There are plenty of sales constantly throughout the year, and plenty of them are on AAA games as well as indie games. Theres an Autumn Sale , Holiday sale, Summer sale, among others. They last weeks and practically every game goes on sale. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find a game that
isn't on sale during one of those sales. Of course those big blockbuster games that came out in the last month or two aren't going to have massive discounts, but I've never found it really worthwhile to purchase those. Pirating is their if you really want to play the latest blockbuster and don't want to pony up the ridiculous prices they charge for rehashes of old games (ie COD).
is all fine but that client and interface STILL face the same DRM stemmed problem that these types will always face. If the email server goes down, and you try to login from another PC, GG for that account for however long it takes to fix it.
That certainly is a disadvantage. While there is an offline mode, it won't work until you've authenticated the computer once before online. Then again I don't constantly move around from computer to computer when I play video games, so that doesn't really concern me. I feel like it's an incredibly obscure problem outweighed by all the advantages that come with steam.
It's also buggy a lot of the time and inconsistent as hell with it's community services.
I haven't had any problems at all with Steam in recent memory. No glaring bugs from what I can tell. Not sure what you're referring to here.
Now let's take a hard critical look at the "Valve TOS policies" that truly subvert it's customers. They have complete totalitarian right to remove games from your library for a multitude of reasons, and never notify you, especially in the case of a delisted game you paid money for, and will never reimburse you that money. They do not have to go through any kind of legal dispute resolution to basically take away all kinds of services like trading, buying games, restricting your account and so on.
I'm sure somewhere in the TOS it gives them that much power. However there are two things to consider here: if Valve really was doing that, there service wouldn't have gotten popular in the first place. Steam had to start somewhere, just like everyone else, and wouldn't have gained this much popularity if it did that. The more important thing though, is this: just because you agreed to it in the TOS, doesn't necessarily make it legal. There are things that aren't legal, even if you put it in a contract and make someone sign it (ie you can't have someone sign a contract giving someone permission to kill them, it's still illegal). If Valve actually decided to start taking away games without reason there would be a shitstorm of legal and regulatory issues that would come up, and it would promptly get shut down. It's not happening.
The very fact that if a person let's say gifts you a game, and you play it for let's say 20+ hours and then one day see it's been removed and your account restricted (no trading, buying, selling on market, activating keys, no nothing) and contact Steam support, and they tell you that gift was purchased using a fraudulent means...then you are being essentially punished for the criminal act of somebody else.
Sounds like you have been heavily invested into trading through Steam and TF2 or the like... I don't really see this as a problem. If the purchase is fraudulent, the game should be rescinded.
You aren't the one being punished for it, you didn't even purchase the game yourself. So steam should just start giving away free copies of games now?
Also I'm not saying it's definitely true but this reeks of you being burned by Valve in someway and you now have some sort of a personal vendetta against them. Your post seems to have a lot of personal bias stuck in it.
If your account is logged in by say a family member out of state to add money to your Wallet, and when you login you say by accident it wasn't you who accessed the account from the PC, you are immediately restricted and presumed of being hijacked.
That just seems so obscure. How often do you have out of state family members log in to your steam account to add funds to your steam wallet? Why don't you just do it yourself with their payment info since you're family? Something tells me you're not telling me the entire story here. Even if you are, I think that the case is rare enough that it certainly justifies Steam being suspicious about whether your account was compromised.
they can remove your games at will bypassing any legal dispute resolution, they can cut access to trading simply by logging in from a "different device". All the things I've listed have actually happened to a number of my Steam friends.
I've never had any of that happen to me, nor to anyone else I know. The amount of bs that you seem to be pulling out is getting kind of ridiculous. Any sort of proofs to your claims?
Then that brings us to customer support. Steam support is by far the WORST of all companies distributing games to resolve issues of any kind, worse than Sony, EA, GOG, Nintendo, and MS combined. Often people can wait a week or more for a answer to a support ticket, while of course their account is restricted for a Valve bank fuck up while one of those great Steam sales you mentioned goes on. It's just atrocious, you can't call them for support anymore, you can't live chat. Only a support email ticket and a prayer they will answer within three days. That is NOT indicative of a company that values it's customers and their issues, considering this is a private company worth billions, that instead of hiring a competent support team and implementing live chat and generally improving and adding more features to the client.
I will admit that it's rather lackluster. They do have the capabilities to add some sort of decent support structure but all they have are support tickets. Then again I and many others haven't really had too many issues that warranted contacting support due to Steam's reliability overall, but it still is a sticking point. Valve certainly could use better support.
And of course we could go into the fact if Valve REALLY CARED about getting ALL the best content they could, they just don't and have zero proactive-ness in getting the PC versions Day 1 by being at the barginning table for those games with money on the table. Not to mention older games or compilations they could easily make a killing on they don't seem to go after (Mega Man Anthology, MGS HD Collection, Silent Hill Collection, OG ResiEvil series HD anybody?). Many of which are already on PC and have already been ported. Where's Planescape Torment, where's Ultima Underworld 1 & 2? The fact is, Valve isn't proactive for games on their market, they simply sit back and just hope and wait a PC version comes, they don't go after them aggressively like they could. If that were true then there would already be word of Valve in talks with Platinum Games to bring over Vanquish seeing how well Metal Gear Rising sold, but no. So Valve is what Valve is. And honestly, with the stuff I've just laid out PC gamers deserve a far better platform and company at their back for them, imo.
I... really don't understand how this is a knock against Steam at all
. So you wan't Valve to more proactive in the gaming industry and lay down fat bucks for games to be released on the PC that are console exclusive? This isn't a disadvantage of Steam as a distribution platform, it sounds like you want to be Valves new business manager. Without even considering whether it would be profitable for Valve to do this (it wouldn't) the companies that release games sans a PC version do it for a very specific purpose. When you release a PC version, you release a piratable version. When you release a piratable version, console sales suffer (and that's where most of the money is). Companies would never pull a complete 180 on this policy without a massive amount of money from Valve. Valve is still a private company and not as big as you think it is. They can't just pull money out of their ass to be the idealistic, naive view of a knight in shining armor for the PC industry that you seem to have.
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Originally Posted by Rart
There are plenty of sales constantly throughout the year, and plenty of them are on AAA games as well as indie games. Theres an Autumn Sale , Holiday sale, Summer sale, among others. They last weeks and practically every game goes on sale. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find a game that isn't on sale during one of those sales. Of course those big blockbuster games that came out in the last month or two aren't going to have massive discounts, but I've never found it really worthwhile to purchase those. Pirating is their if you really want to play the latest blockbuster and don't want to pony up the ridiculous prices they charge for rehashes of old games (ie COD).
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. So you wan't Valve to more proactive in the gaming industry and lay down fat bucks for games to be released on the PC that are console exclusive? This isn't a disadvantage of Steam as a distribution platform, it sounds like you want to be Valves new business manager. Without even considering whether it would be profitable for Valve to do this (it wouldn't) the companies that release games sans a PC version do it for a very specific purpose. When you release a PC version, you release a piratable version. When you release a piratable version, console sales suffer (and that's where most of the money is). Companies would never pull a complete 180 on this policy without a massive amount of money from Valve. Valve is still a private company and not as big as you think it is. They can't just pull money out of their ass to be the idealistic, naive view of a knight in shining armor for the PC industry that you seem to have.
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